Comments on: Open Source Project Management

By: Bill Elkins

Bill Elkins — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

As I have recently become a member of the RIFed IT masses I am using the time to update my technical skills. Linux seems to be a viable alternative to the M$ platform.

I am wondering how well Mr. Project is meeting your needs. It appears to have the feature set I have most often observed in use by Project Managers.

Any feedback on challenges would be appreciated.

Thanks, Bill

By: Must Remain Anon

Must Remain Anon — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

It is for me … I actually would love an XSLT method of tranforming a *.mrproject file (which is just XML) into a set of web pages (Gannt, Resource List, Tasks …) so a project could be “Webified” for viewing now and then. This also might help to spec out some missing features (like the ability to associate arbitrary files, links, and e-mail messages with tasks and thus points on a Gannt).

If MrProject could be associated with an mbox formatted mail folder that gets formatted for the webifed version using MHonArch or a similar external tool that would be cool. Then mail could be received for the project via SMTP and sorted to a mailbox (with attachments etc.) A piece of mail could be viewed from mrproject since the app would just launch the users mail client when the attached document (in this case e-mail) link is clicked on inside MrProject. You’d a get a web archive and custom project management view of the project and related mail.

Note: this is all very doable with not too much extra work. If MrProject can use DBus or CORBA/Orbit to laucn e-mail clients and a browser …. we’re there. The export to “webified” project directory might be tricky but …

By: Ken

Ken — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

Hi Bill. Thanks for your comments and sorry to hear about the layoff. I hope the time off has been productive for you and helped you to refocus on what’s important. I also hope that you’re chasing some good leads for new employment!

Mr. Project, while a decent piece of software with a good user interface, still has a number of issues outstanding that surface when using the product. Some of these are as niggling as no keyboard shortcuts (which become not-so-niggling when you try to enter large quantities of data). One of the bigger issues is that I couldn’t use the PDF export feature to export my Gantt charts for printout. This was a big deal—especially when I was required to do so for a presentation. The PDF format is buggy and will crash Adobe Acrobat.

Mr. Anonymous makes a great point that the open file format makes this less of an issue: I could have simply applied XSLT to the XML format that Mr. Project uses, but XSLT is a bit unweildly. I still have to take a breath when I delve into my site CSS, let alone dynamically formatting data with XSLT.

I finally decided that the biggest problem with Mr. Project was the same as any open source software: I just spent too much time trying to make it work and not enough time getting work done. I explored this productivity problem in an entry at our team project website:

http://www.kennsarah.net/project/archives/000162.shtml

Hope that helps.

By: sean

sean — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

List of open source project management tools.
http://proj.chbs.dk/

Found while searching for a collaboration tool to be used in the rebuild of my church website (still searching for the best tool).

By: Frank Bergmann

Frank Bergmann — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

The reduction of project management to drawing Gantt chars seems to be misleading. Most of the systems at proj.chbs.dk http://proj.chbs.dk/ have a wider scope and also address project collaboration and the setup, controlling and finishing phases of projects. Checkout the M-Modell, for example at http://www.pm-studie.de/ .

Bests,
Frank

By: Ken Walker

Ken Walker — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

Frank–good insight. As it turns out, Gantt diagrams tended to be my least favorite activity for my Senior Project class because they took me away from doing “real work”–sending emails, making phone calls, writing documentation, and so on. Also, since I had been reading up on other management techniques (like XP), I thought of my project in more agile, unstructured terms. Gantt charts work with the assumption that tasks can be completely known ahead of time, which Agile methodology points out is simply not true.

In practice, I used Mantis BT http://mantisbt.sourceforge.net to act as a “backlog” of tasks that needed getting done for our project. That way, I could simply assign high-priority tasks to the responsible parties. It also meant a lot of “bug triage” in order to determine what was high priority and what wasn’t, but that work seemed more useful to me than trying to draw fancy Gantt charts that no one was looking at other than our professor (”management”).

In passing, I noticed dotProject http://dotproject.net/ (listed on proj.chbs.dk) seems to be a very usable and interesting system for web-based project management. Thanks for the links!